Imagine a world with no calendars and no clocks; how would you cope with the passage of time? When to sow seeds? when to harvest? When to prepare for the long period without much fresh food? when to eat up stored food before it spoils. Of course the answer must be that you’d still have the sun whose day length waxes and wanes just like the moon does. The moon offers a different account of the seasons of great significance to sailors and fishermen but both mark the year. A solar calendar and a lunar calendar. The deep sky at night offers another cycle through the alignments of the stars. These are all natural calendars which align more or less with the seasons. The ancestors thought it important enough to build an observatory at Stonehenge.
Because those weasel words ‘more or less‘ highlight the difficulty that our imagined ancestors faced. When exactly do the days begin to shorten and when do they start to lengthen again? This, along with ‘when is high summer?’ and ‘when midwinter?’ is a matter of exquisite importance to the farmer and horticulturalist. However we’re not the same as those ancestors because we have atomic clocks and science and we live in the tailwind of the Christian centuries here in the UK. In addition we largely have very little to do with the growing and harvesting seasons. So we have a kind of rich sedimentary history of our relationship with time and the seasons are still as important to us emotionally as they were when we were tending the land and sailing the seas. Seasons without markers, without celebrations would leave a large part of our culture inaccessible.
Many centuries ago when St Augustine of Canterbury arrived here from Rome, he discovered a largely pagan society. The Romans brought Christianity to England and when they left they left a vacuum into which paganism flowed back. Augustine wrote an anguished letter to the Pope recounting the apparently pagan natives worshipping in non Christian temples. The Pope wrote back and said take them back and rename the pagan festivals with Christian saints’ names. I imagine the people didn’t care very much whose badge was over the door and the pagan festival was never truly lost. Christmas overlaid midwinter, and the Nine Lessons and Carols was always good for seeing the village unite, and so on. Easter was a bit of a problem because it was attached to an old lunar calendar festival called oestre (work that one out!). So we now have the residues of ancient paganism overlaid by Roman Christianity, overlaid by a newer Germanic form of paganism, overlaid once again with monastic Christianity, then the Catholic hegemony overlaid by Protestant Christianity and finally by modern agnosticism and scientific rationalism. The key point is that all of these continue to function actively (if unnoticed) within our minds.
Let’s be clear, I intensely dislike the term “paganism” because its negative and critical connotations attack a way of life which has never gone away. But when I used the word ‘sedimentary‘ I meant that these historical cultural layers never really go away; they still resonate and still awaken memories which are closer in time to us than we often know. Hands up anyone who went to a wassail in the last few weeks!
All of which is to remember a festival which is the process of being revived. True to form, in Ireland it’s a festival dedicated to St Brigid but it goes back much further. How, we ask, do we know that winter is ebbing and spring flowing. When we view the question through the series of sedimentary orthodoxies we see that it has various dates in modern times – Winter Solstice represents the shortest days, but when do we begin to notice days getting longer. Christmas is far too soon after solstice to see the days really lengthening. By the Spring solstice around March 21st it’s obvious and if you’re a farmer you might have missed the boat. But the pagan feast of Imbolc is enjoying something of a revival because even in the grip of winter storms, we can all see the days lengthening. We’ve turned the corner – and it’s today.
